The Garden, You, and I eBook

Thrip, the little transparent, whitish fly,
will sometimes bother border carnations in the same
way as it does roses. If the flowers are only
in bud, I sprinkle them with my brass rose-atomizer
and powder slightly with helebore. But if the
flowers are open, sprinkling and shaking alone may
be resorted to. For the several kinds of underground
worms that trouble pinks, of which the wireworm is
the chief, I have found a liberal use of unslaked
lime and bone-dust in the preparation of the soil
before planting the best preventive.

Other ailments have appeared only occasionally.
Sometimes an apparently healthy, full-grown plant
will suddenly wither away, or else swell up close
to the ground and finally burst so that the sap leaks
out and it dies like a punctured or girdled tree.
The first trouble may come from the too close contact
of fresh manure, which should be kept away from the
main roots of carnations, as from contact with lily
bulbs.

As to the swelling called gout, there is no
cure, so do not temporize. Pull up the plant
at once and disinfect the spot with unslaked lime and
sulphur.

Thus, Mary Penrose, may you have either pinks in your
garden or a garden of pinks, whichever way you may
care to develop your idea. “A deal of trouble?”
Y-e-s; but then only think of the flowers that crown
the work, and you might spend an equal amount of time
in pricking cloth with a steel splinter and embroidering
something, in the often taken-in-vain name of decorative
art, that in the end is only an elaborated rag—­without
even the bone and the hank of hair!

XVI

THE FRAME OF THE PICTURE

VINES AND SHRUBS

(Mary Penrose to Barbara Campbell)

Woodridge, September 10. Your chronicle of
the Pink Family found me by myself in camp, dreaming
away as vigorously as if it was a necessary and practical
occupation. After all, are we sure that it is
not, in a way, both of these? This season my
dreams of night have been so long that they have lingered
into the things of day and vice versa, and yet
neither the one nor the other have whispered of idleness,
but the endless hope of work.

Bart’s third instalment of vacation ends to-morrow,
though we shall continue to sleep out of doors so
long as good weather lasts; the remaining ten days
we are saving until October, when the final transplanting
of trees and shrubs is to be made; and in addition
to those for the knoll we have marked some shapely
dogwoods, hornbeams, and tulip trees for grouping
in other parts of the home acres. There are also
to be had for the digging good bushes of the early
pink and clammy white azalea, mountain-laurel, several
of the blueberry tribe, that have white flowers in
summer and glorious crimson foliage in autumn, white-flowered
elder, button-bush, groundsel tree, witchhazel, bayberry,
the shining-leaved sumach, the white meadow-sweet,
and pink steeplebush, besides a number of cornels
and viburnums suitable for shrubberies. As I
glance over the list of what the river and quarry woods
have yielded us, it is like reading from the catalogue
of a general dealer in hardy plants, and yet I suppose
hundreds of people have as much almost at their doors,
if they did but know it.